Recently approved. Poetry is always a hard nut to crack. It's often about illustrating the mood of the text, or else coming up with something which, at first blush, seems entirely abstract.


Where does this cover sit in said equation? 50% author's request to see a bird on the cover, 50% this excerpt from the title poem:

An act born from a crowd’s seething will
I heave the blunt harm of a brick at helmets
and shields, a slow, magnificent arc.
My brick in flight is like a dove, you shriek.

Good V Bad

From my A.D.: 'Matt has come from Vancouver to Toronto to try and talk his HIV positive friend, Zane, out of letting himself die as a political/artistic statement, denying himself the life-saving AIDS drugs that are denied to so many poor people around the word. Our hero just wants his friend to live and in trying to get him to abandon the plan, he writes seven short notes that turn virtue into vice. The notes provide the friend with "seven good reasons not to be good.'"

The book also deals with quantum entanglement, a theory which states that once two particles interact in some way, you can separate them by light years of space but that intimate connection will remain, to the extent that tinkering with one particle will have an instantaneous effect on the other no matter the distance between them.

Herewith, the final cover. Spot gloss on the molecules.
Click to enlarge.




An early comp which dealt with the book's themes of interconnectedness and loss in, perhaps, a more literal manner.



And this perhaps wisely-rejected comp which played with the ideas of Matt's seven letters themselves. I'll be the first to admit it: the type is awful.